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Sunday 27 May 2012

Marilyn

Tuesday, 19th January 2010

What was it? What is it? I’ve been trying to work it out for years. I get wisps of this and that, one clue and then another clue but I simply cannot explain the whole impact made by the phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe.

Looking along my two full shelves of MM books once a man raised his eyebrows and said he was surprised my husband was a Marilyn Man. When I claimed the books he gave me a very odd look.

No need. I haven`t a gay bone in my body. But she was something quite extraordinary, and once her spell is cast over you, it is cast for life. I first came under that spell when I was fifteen or so and saw her in a pretty bad film with Laurence Olivier, hamming it up appallingly – The Prince and the Showgirl. But even in that something about MM came wham off the screen. She was married to Arthur Miller at the time this film was being made – they came to England, and crowds and were followed everywhere. People wanted that marriage to work – I suppose I did too, wanted the intellectual, bespectacled, genius of a playwright and Hollywood’s most bankable move star to be not just an anachronistic love-match but a long-term marital success story. Alas.

If The Prince and the Showgirl was bad, apart from Monroe, Some Like it Hot was a brilliant film and it also had Monroe. Tony Curtis was never better, the wisecrack dialogue is as good as it gets, the all-round acting was superb and Monroe was at her astonishing best. And so it went on.

But it is not only the films, it is the whole sorry, sad, inevitable reverse-Cinderella story with Monroe rising to stardom and beauty and fame from a terrible childhood, only to fall again, the shooting star crashing to earth in a haze of drugs and misery, exploited by men wherever she went, vulnerable and yet with an inner toughness that helped see her through for longer than might have been predicted. She could never find the right man, she probably did not know how good an actress she was, and certainly not that she would become one of the greatest Hollywood icons of all time.

Was she beautiful? Yes and no – pretty certainly, but it is not facial beauty that makes her so magnetic. She was one of the most photogenic of women – in picture after picture, whether taken by a passing newspaperman or a great photographer like Eve Arnold, Monroe is astonishing, never looking posed and yet always posing, pleased with the attention, relaxed, laughing, sometimes very casual, at others in full glamour mode, never less than riveting.

She would be over eighty years old now but those whom the gods love. Marilyn old is unimaginable. She lives on in celluloid and photographs, in the stories told about her, the conspiracies, the tantrums, the childlike earnestness, the desire for learning and reading and self-improvement, the simple need to be a simple person yet the rejection of anything less than mega-stardom, lives on as a young woman whose appeal can never finally be summed up or pinned down.

How good it would be to rewind the film and re-tell the story, in which she finds the right man, the security and love and belief she craved and could never have, how good to see her in many more seriously good films and in serious films, too – she could do the giggling, the come-on sexiness, the swaying movements, but she could have been more than just a move star.

Just? There was nothing ‘just' about Marilyn. Just the stardom.

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Bunnykins

January 20th, 2010 12:19pm Report this comment

What was it?
Andy Warhol?

Anne Wotana Kaye 1

January 20th, 2010 1:34pm Report this comment

If only she had been born a decade later, maybe she would have had the confidence to stand up to the cruel male world she allowed herself to be controlled and used by. So lovely, so vulnerable she was exploited by politicians and other powerful men. This was an age, seen in "Mad Men" when women either wore kitchen aprons to greet their husbands, or were sirens who slept in Chanel No.5. She could have been in the cast of this show to perfection. She was my teenage years' idol, but even then I only envied her beauty, never her enslavement.

Pete Hoskin

January 20th, 2010 5:28pm Report this comment

Great post, Susan. Have you seen Fritz Lang's 'Clash by Night' (1952)? That's got a wonderfully bubbly performance from MM - alongside Barbara Stanwyck, no less. And I've always enjoyed her in 'Niagara' (1953).

SUSAN HILL

January 20th, 2010 6:26pm Report this comment

Pete. Haven`t seen Clash by Night, no, yes to Niagara. Thanks, a must-get.
ANNE. You're right.. but look at the way Diana's same vulnerability was exploited - though she was an altogether tougher cookie.

Beer Moth

January 20th, 2010 10:58pm Report this comment

Ah, how many of my pubescent hours were spent with Miss Monroe, she plying me with bourbon, hiding me from an unworthy world, behind the curtains of that chrome railway sleeper-car all the way to Florida.

I still feel a pang of guilt over ditching Kathy Kirby.

Boo boo be doo.

Kevyn Bodman

January 21st, 2010 5:29pm Report this comment

I could see nothing much in the photos or posters of Marilyn Monroe, but I still remember the first time I saw her on film,walking down the platform to the train in Some Like It Hot.Immediately captivating.

The most photogenic of modern film stars:
Sandra Bullock.
Not all her films have been good,and she's not the most obviously beautiful, but the camera seems to love her.

egh

January 21st, 2010 6:59pm Report this comment

Well I don't get it at all. Never did - thought she was ridiculous. Horrid, even.
Perhaps I should apologize to you all for saying so! ....

SUSAN HILL

January 22nd, 2010 3:12pm Report this comment

Perhaps you should. That you can't see it is one thing... possibly even 'ridiculous' But horrid, no. How and why on earth ...? Some of the still photos of her with barely any make-up and flying blonde hair are stunning - and entirely innocent. Look at those and try again.,

Yes, walking down the railway platform summed it all up.

James Murphy

January 24th, 2010 11:36am Report this comment

'Exploited by men wherever she went...' - Oh diddums! And of course MM never exploited her own sexuality for her own gain, did she? Really, Susan, from you I expect a more rigorous intellectual analysis this treacly old cods-wallop! Surely the allure of MM's tragedy lies precisely in her own inner conflict; that in some indefinable sense she absolutely deserved her fate? This does not rule out either admiration or compassion for her. But to seek to level the actress's demise down to the level of a proto-feminist cause celebre diminishes her mystery and does her no personal credit at all. Indeed, it dresses up her in the usual victim role, which persona most recent feminism has surely been so concerned to reject on behalf of womankind over the past couple of decades. Let us treat MM not as a football in the gender war, but as she was: deeply attractive, deeply flawed - deeply human.

Jeremy

January 24th, 2010 11:49am Report this comment

I'm not in any strict sense a "fan", and I haven't seen that much of her work, but you are right...she was something of a phenomenon; a one-off. Like Elvis, in a different sphere. And like him, she had the right "face" for it. Not just that, of course. She was a tremendous actress, there's no doubt about that. She absolutely sparkles in "Some Like It Hot" and, I dare say, in other films...

I'm not sure that I rate Miller as highly as you seem to do. He strikes me as being one of those drearily earnest left-wing intellectuals who empathise with the workers without ever having lived - or truly understood - their lives. See "The Misfits".

I also think there is something morbid about being a Marilyn fan, just as there is something morbid about being an Elvis fan. Both had dreadfully under-fulfilled careers and both were destroyed by American-style stardom and celebrity and all the hideous emptiness that goes with it. Really, icons of that sort should serve as warning signs - Don't Go There.

Augustus

January 24th, 2010 10:27pm Report this comment

In 1952 Ella Fitzgerald was refused a booking at a major nightclub called The Mocambo. Marilyn made such a fuss with the management that they relented and Marilyn sat at a front table every night during Ella's performances. Apparently, that particular engagement opened the door to the big money for Ella. It must have been fun for Marilyn to accomplish that. So next time you hear the First Lady of Swing think of Marilyn.

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